How a Fan of Comic Books Transformed Himself Into a Hollywood Player

By DAVID M. HALBFINGER

Published: June 30, 2007

Drink in hand, attaboys coming at him from every direction, Tom DeSanto was living the fanboy dream.

At the party after the ''Transformers'' mega-premiere in Westwood on Wednesday night, Mr. DeSanto, one of that action movie's producers, was the leather-jacketed picture of a hungry Hollywood hustler finally eyeing a hearty meal of credit, money and maybe even a modicum of stature.

It was his enthusiasm for the Transformers comic book and toy line, after all, that in June 2003 persuaded the Hasbro toy company to let him and a partner try to sell a Transformers movie to the studios, and that eventually piqued the interest of DreamWorks. Just as he had once persuaded the director Bryan Singer to drop his skepticism about making a comic-book movie and take on the X-Men franchise for 20th Century Fox. And just as he had once helped stir up interest in a television revival of ''Battlestar Galactica,'' before being shoved aside as it morphed into a critically acclaimed series on the Sci Fi Channel.

''The way my career's shaping up, I find those properties where no one else is looking -- sort of the penny stocks,'' Mr. DeSanto said.

Mr. DeSanto, 38, has come a long way from Elizabeth, N.J., where his father was a police officer. He grew up collecting thousands of comic books, racing home from football practice to play Dungeons and Dragons and spinning out his own fantastic serialized story lines to pals in the high school cafeteria.

Ever since, he's been fighting his way up the movie-industry ladder, cobbling together a film education in night school and summer programs while working at J. C. Penney and scribbling ideas for characters and story arcs on the back of cash register receipts.

Now, with his name on what is expected to become the first big Paramount franchise since ''Mission: Impossible,'' he's closing on a house in secluded Beachwood Canyon, looking for movie deals on a few more relics from the pop culture dustbin and talking somewhat fantastically about building an empire of his own one day out of his old register receipts and dog-eared notebooks. But he's also getting an education in the blood sport that ensues when Hollywood smells a hit, and there's glory to be divvied up.

Mr. DeSanto's first break came when he was hired as Mr. Singer's assistant on a Miramax science fiction anthology in 1995 and impressed the director with script suggestions, before the project collapsed. He received a co-producer credit on Mr. Singer's ''Apt Pupil'' in 1998. Then, when Fox sought Mr. Singer's services for ''X-Men,'' Mr. DeSanto persuaded the director that this wasn't merely a comic-book yarn but a hefty story with parallels to Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, and earned an executive producer's credit in the bargain.

''He deserves enormous credit,'' said Peter Rice, who oversaw the movie and now runs Fox Searchlight and Fox 2000. ''He was instrumental in bringing Bryan into the project, and he had a very good sense of the tone and theme of the original comic book.''

Mr. Singer, who went on to make ''Superman Returns,'' said Mr. DeSanto was ''a great sounding board for what fans would expect, and not expect, and yet he understood that we had a movie to make.''

That fanboy's conscience appears to have become at least an irritant on ''Transformers,'' however. While Mr. DeSanto is described in generally kind terms, his partner, Don Murphy, is widely reviled by executives at Paramount and DreamWorks for allowing his personal Web site (donmurphy.net) to be used by Transformers fans to attack the two studios, and the movie's lead producer, Lorenzo di Bonaventura, in vicious personal terms. (They called him Scorponok, after one of the evil robot characters in the movie.)

Asked if he would offer an apology to Mr. di Bonaventura for the nasty posts, Mr. Murphy, whose production company is called Angry Films, bluntly said, ''Nope.''

The behind-the-scenes sideshow, with its classic Hollywood credit-grabbing, backstabbing and trash-talking, all done strictly off the record, has somewhat tarnished the ramp-up to the movie's July 2 opening (recently moved up from July 4) -- and, to a degree, Mr. DeSanto's moment in the limelight.

Several people involved with the movie noted acidly, for example, that Mr. DeSanto and Mr. Murphy's pitch for a Transformers movie -- which had an environmental-catastrophe theme -- did not actually find any takers, though executives at DreamWorks were intrigued by the idea. Only when Paramount began pursuing the property with Mr. di Bonaventura, and DreamWorks learned of this from Mr. DeSanto, did DreamWorks buy Mr. DeSanto's treatment, largely thanks to Steven Spielberg's belief that ''Transformers'' was blockbuster material.

''Steven's the reason that we're here today,'' Mr. DeSanto said.

Humility aside, Mr. DeSanto does have some grandiose if not outlandish ideas, not least about where he is headed next in Hollywood.

''What I aspire to is to be George Lucas,'' he said. ''He owns the things he created. My whole battle plan in coming out to Hollywood was to climb the ladder by selling off other people's children'' -- meaning established but underperforming properties like moribund comic-book lines -- ''to get to the point where, my notebooks and notebooks filled with original ideas, I can control them.''

So, for now, he's working on a movie deal for ''Teen Titans,'' based on the comic-book series (and television show) that followed the adolescence of superhero sidekicks like Robin and Wonder Girl as they ''step out of their parents' shadow,'' Mr. DeSanto said. He's also working on another for ''City of Heroes,'' an online game in which players create their own characters. In the movie Mr. DeSanto wants to make, however, the characters will be his own creations.

In effect, Mr. DeSanto said, he hopes to use the established brand of that computer game as a way to get his own stored-up imaginings into the movies through the back door.

''The studios are so dependent on pre-existing brands, they're not allowing anything new into the pipeline,'' he said. ''They want to know what was the video game or what was the comic book. It's shortsighted. But what's being missed is the next generation of new stuff. Because nostalgia is creative death.''

Photos: Tom DeSanto in front of a billboard advertising ''Transformers.'' He is one of that film's producers. (Photograph by Axel Koester for The New York Times)(pg. B7); Megan Fox, left, Shia LaBeouf and Ironhide, one of the title creatures in ''Transformers.'' (Photograph by DreamWorks Pictures and Paramount Pictures)(pg. B13)